News Release Number: STScI-2014-17

Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes Find One of the Youngest Galaxies in the Universe

February 7, 2014: An international team led by astronomers from the Instituto de Astrofisica de
Canarias (IAC) and La Laguna University (ULL) has just released the first analysis
of the observations of the Abell 2744 cluster of galaxies, a coordinated
program of the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes. They have discovered one
of the most distant galaxies known to date, which clearly shows the potential of
the multi-year Frontier Fields project. The project uses a
phenomenon called "gravitational lensing" where select foreground galaxy
clusters amplify the faint light from far-more-distant background objects. By combining Hubble and Spitzer data, these astrophysicists have determined the
properties of this young galaxy with a better precision than previous studies of
other samples at similar cosmic epochs. This galaxy, named Abell2744_Y1, is
about 30 times smaller than our galaxy, the Milky Way, but is producing at least
10 times more stars. From Earth, this galaxy is seen as it was 650 million years
after the big bang. It is one of the brightest galaxies discovered at such a
lookback time, say researchers. This study provides new constraints on the
density and properties of the galaxies in the early universe. These results are
accepted for publication in the scientific journal Astronomy and Astrophysics
Letters.

In addition to the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC) and La Laguna University (ULL), the team is composed of researchers from France (Institut de
Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie and Centre de Recherche
Astrophysique de Lyon), Switzerland (Geneva University and Ecole Polytechnique
Federal de Lausanne), and the United States (University of Arizona). For more
information about these results, visit:
http://www.iac.es/divulgacion.php?op1=16&id=836&lang=en .